Researching teaching and learning in the 21st century

SITE exploration begins: Our Tuesday Insights

We have begun arriving in Jacksonville in waves. We left a chilly (but sunny) DFW area to arrive in Florida awash in rain. The SITE keynote Tuesday is Hod Lipson from Cornell University who will be discussing “The Future of 3-D Printing.” He will address the disruptive principles which promise to transform almost every aspect of our lives. Need I say more? We are off on our adventure and will be sharing our observations of keynotes and sessions along the way.

11 Comments

Sitting here being amazed by the possibilities of 3-D printing–the keynote address by Hod Lipson. He says that 3-D printing is now at the point where computers were in their infancy in education.
Here are some of the disruptions that he has observed based on how people are using 3-D technology:

Disruptions
Complexity is free–making something complex is not time consuming or add more money
Variety is accessible (free) don’t have to change the machine to make something different
No assembly required–labor doesn’t cost, more efficient,
Less lead time (when you have the design already) can iterate quickly/can innovate quickly
Zero constraints–can make something that wasn’t done before
Zero skill– no manufacturing skills–skill is in the design.
(guns–fear that kids can print guns–can blow up in your hands) Safety issues,
Compact portable manufacturing–implications for supply chains
Less waste when printing in metal,
Infinite shades of materials can combine things in new ways!!! Print out of own cells is possible.
Precise repeatability (copied closely) intellectual property issues, is it the original or copy?

What are mobile technologies
What are distinctive about mobile learning
– authenticity, collaboration, and personalization

Personalization was the lowest ranked area of self-reported analysis
Each ears were not using the online conversation aspect of the learning. This may be tied to the fact that the devices tended to be school owned and not allowed to be removed fom the school.
Investigating Distinctive Pedagogies in Mobile Learning
—

Love your comment, BJ, that people in Taiwan were practicing English language skills by interacting with other gamers in virtual realities. I think this has a lot of potential for language learning. I had a German student who did exactly the same. For his level he was leap-years ahead of his cohort.

From my end:
I hope someone goes to the keynotes and brings back lots of information! I saw Alison Carr-Chellman’s TED talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_engage_boys_in_learning.html. It was great!!! Lots of food for thought, and what nochild left behind and zero tolerance – and having fewer male teacher role models – are doing to the space in which boys learn in elementary school and beyond. It presented some conflicting ideas in my own psyche! Her main point: bring gaming into school. Boys do it anyway. And don’t worry about the violence. Hmmm. . . Would like to know what you all think.

From her blog http://theboysinitiative.wordpress.com/our-bloggers/ali-carr-chellman/: “Alison A. Carr Chellman is currently the head of the Learning and Performance Systems department in the College of Education at the Pennsylvania State University. Her current research and teaching includes work with games in schools, both educational and commercial/entertainment. She is currently interested in the attitudes of teachers and parents toward gaming in the classroom and has a TED talk on the topic of using games to re-engage boys in their own schooling.”

3D printers are both awesome and scary. What we can do with them is wonderful — and scary. Whew. What creations are we creating? Both for good and ill? Guns, safety issues, and intellectual property issues. Are there any suggested solutions on the horizon for them? Let us know! It seems that with the great changes in the world, we are going to have to address new ethical issues more and more often.

Hope you all are having fun in Florida. I looked out the window, and it is sunny here. Wish I were with you, too!

Using Facebook in teacher education: lessons & tips from the field
—
How we have used Facebook groups as a help desk for questions…
Meet students where they are
Foster communication & collaboration
Establish a professional learning community
Reduce repetitious course-related inquires directly to instructors

Done this for the last three years
Allows privacy wall between you and your students- you do not have to friend them
Allows from privacy settings between students
Crowd sourcing; answers are shared, not repeated
Naturally develops as a course knowledge base
This is an informal group, not dependent on assignments.

Drawbacks
Groups has a bad search engine
No threaded discussions or topics
Students who do not already use Facebook may feel left out

That is interesting to learn language through game!
It is just like Korean students learn English through singing with Karaoke.
I arrived on Tuesday afternoon and saw Laurel who lost her watch. Fortunately she found it at lost and found!!!!!

3D presents a lot of changes for manufacturing, but it can also serve as a learning tool by allowing us to focus on the highest level of Bloom’s taxonomy, Creation. UT Arlington Libraries seeks to build a makerspace allowing for creation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and real-world skills. http://www.uta.edu/news/releases/2014/03/Library-CXIspace.php

SITE presented a number of alternatives for building community outside the traditional classroom or LMS. BJ already mentioned how one class found facebook to an ideal help site. A round table presentation on facebook presented a closed facebook group for an in-person French class. Eddy Cuisinier, from Western Kentucky University, created this closed group to add another avenue to share French culture. Though voluntary and requiring posts to be in French, students quickly participated. He also noticed increased collaboration in the classroom among the students and improved grades.

My favorite thing on the first Tuesday was about using Google Docs (or specifically Google Hangout) to review for a test. Students post questions for several days leading up to the hour designated for review. Then on the day/time of the review, the professor answered the question in order. Youtube records the session and bookmarks the questions so that students may return to it.
I’m not yet a big Google user, but this made it very appealing.